Matt Owen

Matt Owen is Head of Social Media at Econsultancy. He looks after Econsultancy’s global social media strategy and architecture, where he has led community engagement and growth since 2010.

Matt has a background in music, film and television in addition to marketing, and was instrumental in building the UK's largest entertainment blog network before moving into dedicated social management and strategy for one of the world's largest business schools before joining Econsultancy. He has a particular interest in social measurement and organizational integration.

In addition, he works with a community of 200,000+ digital marketers daily across a variety of social channels and has written best practice guides for popular social platforms. He contributes regularly to the Econsultancy blog, industry titles and makes regular appearances at events and conferences.

How m-commerce made Amazon $1bn

m-commerce Since their first faltering online steps back in 1995, Amazon have often been at odds with prevailing web trends, and with their latest earnings report showing a fall-off in profits recently, many stockholders are considering selling up and moving on.

However, buried in the same report is an important figure that hints that the company may simply be ahead of the curve, becoming the first group to turnover more than $1bn solely through mobile channels.

by Matt Owen 02 August 2010 14:33pm 1 comment

Ten steps to great CRM

One of the main goals of multichannel is to provide great customer service at all levels. Correctly implemented CRM will enhance your business and reputation, but in order to implement effective new ways of interacting with your customers across multiple channels you may be looking at a complete organisational shift, in effect moving from provider to service.

A strategic business change at this level isn’t always easy, but there are ways to minimize the stress and align your company philosophy so that you can really deliver for your customer.

by Matt Owen 30 July 2010 12:45pm 4 comments

Is Google planning to kill SEO?

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is by link-building. All over the world experts spend hours rifling through analytics for likely linking targets, while writers take extra care to add in as many blue words as possible in the hope of a little linklove reciprocation.

It’s often a major aspect of the job for anyone who works online, and can be something of a labour of love.

Of course, there’s no solid, standard way of linking out. If only there was a dedicated expert body who could help out.

Someone like Google maybe?

by Matt Owen 30 July 2010 12:04pm 34 comments

Five ways to ruin your website

bad-web-design Go and look at your Facebook page. Go on, right now. And don’t pretend you haven’t got one, we’ve been watching you and we know you spend six hours a day playing Mafia Wars.

OK, so what do you notice about it?

How about cleanliness? Facebook takes a lot of flak, but one thing it does well is design.

Recently we’ve started to see the introduction of customer landers, backgrounds and headers, but even these are worked into the basic layout.

You can have a hundred boxes on Facebook and it will remain a clean, clear masterclass in whitespace management.

One of the main reasons it managed to crush the crazed glittery-zwinky world of MySpace is that it doesn’t ever make your eyeballs catch fire. Anyone can use it easily.

Now let’s have a look at your website...

by Matt Owen 30 July 2010 11:32am 16 comments

Three ways to increase your online touchpoints

touchpoints As audiences become increasingly sophisticated across all demographics, the likelihood is that your customers will make more targeted and strategic purchases.

In the past emotional factors and visibility held sway when it came to dictating customer habits. If a product was featured in a TV ad, then customers would generally either call in or visit their local store branch to purchase.

These days it’s far more likely they’ll get online and hit the price comparison sites.

In order to retain your audience, it’s important that you become visible in more places. If you’re consistently appearing in all their searches then there’s a far higher chance of conversion.

by Matt Owen 29 July 2010 09:27am 0 comments

We don’t need no tweeting badges

Over on Foursquare and Gowalla, badges are all the rage. Checked in to your office bathroom more than five times? You’ve unlocked the dysentery badge!

On other networks however, these tiny icons seems a little superfluous. Logged in to Facebook 1000 times...so have all your friends...

Still, this hasn’t deterred the founders of the roguishly named Twadges from setting up a similar service for Twitter, awarding tweeters for frequency, followers and obscure criteria such as ‘Joined Twitter before Oprah’.

by Matt Owen 27 July 2010 11:40am 4 comments

Pay with a Tweet: Making money from Twitter the old fashioned way?

pay-with-a-tweet While Twitter has consistently struggled to make a monetisation strategy stick, third party developers may have hit on a solution: haggling.

With paid tweets and trending topics, Twitter has flirted with the idea that buzz can be charged for, but not as directly as a new system devised by NYC marketers Christian Behrendt and Leif Abraham.

Clearly, the pair clearly saw no revenue in Twitter, so have instead directly targeted the tweet itself.

by Matt Owen 28 July 2010 09:51am 3 comments

Don’t believe the hype: three ways social media figures lie

lie detector iphone As more companies introduce social media campaigns, there’s often a real lack of understanding when deciding which numbers really matter, so the default action is often to watch everything.

On the one hand, keeping track of every tweet, post and comment is good practice. However, when it comes to actually interpreting the piles of data, meaningful analysis is sometimes sorely absent.

Ideally you should be able to interpret the figures so that you can both hone your KPIs and make ongoing strategic decisions. By analysing figures in meaningful ways you’ll receive deeper, more useful insights.

Let’s consider a few ways you can sort figurative fact from fiction:

by Matt Owen 26 July 2010 13:20pm 3 comments

Start Me Up! A profile of Lymbix

This week on Start Me Up we’re looking at Canadian company Lymbix, which deals in connotative software for email, and has been causing a media stir lately with their latest product Tonechecker.

This connotative software helps measure the tone and impact of words used in emails and other communications.

We spoke to founder Matt Eldridge to find out more…

by Matt Owen 26 July 2010 11:55am 2 comments

Three steps to social media win

So, you’ve set up a Facebook page, you have a fully automated Twitter account, and your LinkedIn profile is a shining example of professional wonderment for all to behold.

You’ve formulated a strategy and set up tools and processes, and you’re proudly showing off your amazing product with a variety of exciting and innovative campaigns.

Not all social media campaigns will be successful, and the hardest part of any campaign is actual engagement. Creating long-term relationships with customers, creating brand evangelists for your business.

True interaction is the biggest stumbling block on the path to social media success, but by instigating the right policy, it’s also one of the easiest to overcome...

by Matt Owen 26 July 2010 09:50am 5 comments